Bruce, feeling the burn of the knife slash, saw the triumph in the slit eyes of his huge opponent, the realisation that the long sword was a hindrance.
Fear licked the earl, then, for he knew he was in trouble, so he did what a knight was supposed to do – took a deep breath, screamed ‘A Bruce’ until his throat burned, and hurled himself forward.
From the kitchens, turn right, Abbot Jerome had told them, and Hal and Sim did so, moving as swiftly as a watchful crouch would allow. They went past the doors to rooms which may have been priest cells, chapels or storehouses, but no light spilled from the chink of them.
Finally, they reached the end of the passageway, saw the door, limned in pale light which seeped through the bad fitting. Sim and Hal grinned at each other, then Hal, with a sudden leap, realised there were only two.
‘Where’s the boy?’
The boy had gone left, for he had paused to pluck the long thin dagger from Gawter’s dead hand, as much trembling at that as the sudden sight of swaddled folk, like dead risen in their grave rags, who came to stare.
With a last wild look at the smiling Abbot Jerome, the Dog Boy flung himself after Hal and Sim, turning left and birling up the passage, trying to look back and ahead at the same time.
He knew he had lost them a few heartbeats later, but by then he heard the loud roar of ‘A Bruce’ and the bell clangs of steel. He moved towards it, heard the grunts, came up behind the fighters and watched a huge man close in on a hapless victim, who could only wave a sword and back away.
He saw it was the earl and, beyond him and struggling with another man, the earl’s black-visaged man, who was clearly not able to help. He did not hesitate – this was the great lord who had shared wine with him, who had told him the vows of knighthood.
Bruce, backing away, desperately wondering if he would reach a more open area, hoping to get to the door, even if it meant going outside, saw the ox with a knife was about to rush him and end the affair. The French Method, he thought bleakly . . .
Then a wildcat screeched out of the dark and landed on the back of the ox, so that he half-stumbled forward and yelled with surprise and fear. He whirled and clawed with one free hand up behind him, but the wildcat hung on.
The Dog Boy. Bruce saw the frantic, snarling face of the boy and, just as the ox thought of crashing backwards into a wall to dislodge him, the little nut of a fist rose up, stabbed once, then the boy rolled free, the long sliver of dagger trailing fat, flying blood drops.
The ox howled, clapped a hand to his ear, the blood bursting from between his knuckles. He turned, the savage pain and anger of his face turning, as if washed by it, to a bewildered uncertainty. Then he collapsed like an empty bag, the blood spreading under his head.
There was silence save for ragged panting. Bruce saw the Dog Boy, half-crouched on all fours, feral as any forest animal, dagger bloody in one fist.
‘Good stroke,’ he managed hoarsely.
Hal and Sim burst in the door of the Dying Room to a tableaux of figures frozen in butter-yellow light, the shadows guttering wildly on the wall as the tallow was blasted by the wind of their entrance.
A little priest was untying Henry Sientcler from a chair, while a third figure knelt by a truckle bed, cradling the head of a man who gasped and gargled. He raised a face, bewildered and afraid, at the new arrivals.
‘Sir Henry,’ Hal declared and the lord of Roslin flung off the last of the ropes and staggered upright.
‘Hal – by God’s Wounds, I am pleased to see you.’
‘Malise . . .’ Sim declared, for it was clear the man was not here.
‘Gone, moments hence,’ Sir Henry declared, rubbing his wrists. Hal cursed and Sim was about to fling himself out of the door again when Bruce came in, the Dog Boy behind him and, behind that, Kirkpatrick clutching a man by the neck like a terrier with a rat.
‘Malise – did he pass you?’
‘He did not.’
Hal looked at Sim and the man grinned, then loped out to hunt Malise down. Bruce came to the truckle bed and looked down.
‘The Savoyard?’ he asked and Hal nodded.
‘I suspect so.’
‘Malise knifed him,’ the priest declared bitterly. ‘Not that he would have lived anyway . . . this is his uncle.’
The man by the bed stood up and Hal saw that he had a fine tunic stained with his nephew’s blood. His face was grimmed with weary lines of bitterness and resignation.
‘He is alive still,’ Bruce declared and knelt, shoving his face close to the dying man’s. ‘He is trying to speak . . .’
The man’s mouth opened and closed a few times; Bruce bent closer, so that his ear was almost to the lips of the man, and Hal was shamed that the earl was so bent on uncovering the secret of his Stone that he defiled the last peace of a dying man.